What is Reality? ♐ Mercury Cazimi in Sagittarius

Hello Stargazer,

At approximately 6:15pm PST today, Mercury makes his inferior conjunction to the Sun at 14 degrees Sagittarius.

This transit is otherwise known as Cazimi, translating to “In the Heart of the Sun.”

This is a great seed moment. In this cosmic temple beyond the limits of space and time, you may commune with the divine and bear witness to a greater plan for your destiny.

The path of Mercury retrograde is anything but linear and rational—taking the mind down a crooked path to a world hiding behind our very own, one ruled irrationality and unreason.

But to borrow a quote from a 20th century: "If you want to come to your senses, you've first got to go out of your mind."

And it's through Mercury's descent into the underworld that you're given a chance to go out of your mind so that you can come back to your senses with a vengeance.

Hermetic cosmology sees three worlds—heaven, earth and the underworld (divine, human, animal)—all connected by the axis mundi.

The axis mundi has been depicted in mythological traditions as a tree (Yggdrasil of Norse mythology) or mountain (Mount Olympus of Greece). It’s the pillar that holds up the entire universe and connects the human world to one that is at once animistic and divine.

It’s through Mercury that we learn our ancestral wisdom and divine origins in equal measure. Mercury’s Grecian counterpart Hermes was the only god granted the power to travel the full range of the axis mundi, from the heights of Mount Olympus to the depths of Hades.

When he turns retrograde, Mercury descends below the horizon. He transforms from the Winged Messenger into the psychopomp, the guide who carries departed souls into the underworld.

In Hermetica Triptycha Volume One: The Mercury Elemental Year, Gary P. Caton describes the visual phenomena of the Mercury Retrograde as a “disappearing act,” writing that it appears Mercury is “switching skies.”

Caton explains that Mercury crosses the same degree three times during his retrograde cycle: “first as evening star, then becoming invisible and making the inferior conjunction, and finally crossing for the third time as morning star.”

The Mercury Retrograde is an invitation for you to switch selves—to transform from ordinary consciousness to unconscious reverie, from a rational being into an irrational creature. You are being asked to switch patterns and change perception, lest you become a “victim” to the alteration of consciousness naturally underway during the Mercury Retrograde.

You may hear an invitation from Mercury the trickster to switch worlds. It’s an invitation to go within to discover the source of your discontent with others and the world-at-large, rather than point your finger like a heat seeking missile at an easily identifiable enemy. You are being called to break free of rationality, to embrace the irrational and see reality as it truly is (or at least seems to be).

The novels, stories and films of legend Philip K. Dick provide the perfect myths the meditate on for the Mercury Cazimi.

Born with with his Sun (conjunct to Mercury) in Sagittarius. Like his Sagittarius kinsmen, Dick shared William Blake’s ecstasy and Beethoven’s agony, but filtered through his own brand of 20th century gnostic neurosis.

Above all things, Philip K. Dick was a novelist of ideas. He’s not an author who you read for his prose, which betrays the desperate and manic click-clacking of an amphetamine addict’s typewriter ceaselessly meeting another superhuman deadline.

It’s not his prose but his ideas which envelope you in Dick’s work, and one of his favorite ideas to explore was the question, what is reality? Dick once famously answered this question by remarking, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

His greatest indictment on the nature of reality was arguably his 1969 novel Ubik.

Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ubik explores not just the nature of life but afterlife.

Subverting the Tibetan Buddhist practice of preparing the monk for postmortem liberation through the meditation on certain mandalas to help him navigate the Bardo, Ubik asks what happens in the afterlife to a modern subject who has grown up in a world inundated by the interpenetrating mandalas of advertising and propaganda?

Ubik takes place in a future when the human being has evolved a variety of psychic talents so highly developed that they have led to the innovations of technologies that promise you life after death in a simulated virtual reality.

Dubbed half-life, the technologies maintain enough neural activity to keep you alive in a suspended state, allwowing you to speak with your loved ones via teletransmitter. You can converse with the deceased for up to 60 hours in half-life before their consciousness is assimilated back into the great void. Imagine a countdown timer hovering over a Zoom call with your dead loved ones. That’s half-life—and it's big business in the world of Ubik.

The novel's everyman protagonist, a half-life IT guy named Joe Chip, wakes up in an anomalous world following a freak accident. Joe's world starts to move backwards and fall apart.

A once fresh pack of cigarettes dries out and disintegrates instantaneously, its expiration date reading sometime last century. Starships revert into commercial airliners then into old-timey aeroplanes. All of Joe’s friends age at an accelerated rate and die before his eyes.

Ads for a mystery product called Ubik haunt the entire novel.

Joe learns that Ubik promises temporarily relief to the anomalous entropy and that threatens his when he learns the truth of his predicament.

[SPOILER ALERT] Joe died in the accident and the rest of the narrative took place while his consciousness was being transferred into a half-life server. The transfer was not entirely stable, which resulted in the entropic anomalies of his world. He discovers that the product Ubik is a virtual panacea for eternal life—or a digital protocol that stabilizes half-life.

The ubiquity of advertising, the ubiquity of God.

Ubik is a perfect text to contemplate during today's Mercury cazimi in Sagittarius, as you reflect on what Philip K. Dick meant when he said:

The Mercury cazimi is a great seed moment.

The traditional image of the cazimi is a messenger entering the throne room of a great king.

If you don't want to miss this magical opportunity, then stop everything you're doing right now so that you can join my Patreon as a paid member.​

Because when you join my Patreon today, you'll get my rare sigil magic workshop as a limited time bonus.

This workshop will teach you everything you need to know about sigil magic in under 30 minutes, so that you can use the potency of the Mercury cazimi to cast a planetary magic spell to become master of reality.

If it seems like everything you're afraid of is coming to life and you're powerless to stop it...

...then today's Mercury cazimi is your opportunity to take the power back.

You have a rare opportunity today to transform fear into courage so that you can get control of your situation and expand beyond your limits to manifest a reality that you're not afraid to believe in.

​Join my Patreon for only $8/month now.​

Much Love,
Rachel